Entertainment

September 2014 - Posts

  • RED Hearts: Entertainment: A Juicy Fresh Tomato Treat

    This is the fifth in a RED Hearts series of spring-into-summer recipes – things you can cook or bake, usually healthy things, always easy things – for the people you heart. Served up by Erika Kwee, 23, “the baker, photographer and typo-maker” behind vegetarian food blog The Pancake Princess.

    To me, the epitome of summer is a sun-warm, supple-skinned tomato with a deep red hue that presages unparalleled earthy sweetness. On appetizer duty during a recent visit home, I plundered my family's garden, which was bulging with carefully tended cherry tomatoes and glossy basil leaves.

    With tomatoes this ripe, this seasonal, it almost feels like a crime to do anything except showcase them in all their natural glory. Bruschetta is a no-cook dish that does just that.

    The best kind of bruschetta is generally thrown together with a little bit of this and as much as you like of that. However, below are some basic proportions you can use as a guide to making it your own. I added a few ripe apricots we had on hand for an extra hit of sweetness and toothsome texture, but feel free to go total tomato for a classic bruschetta.

    Also classic is that it’s served on slices of toasted baguette, but I used leftover bagels, sliced thin, toasted, and drizzled with olive oil for an easy, crunchy base. Or skip even the act of toasting and try your most delightful spread of summer on thin crackers.

    Fresh Tomato-Apricot Bruschetta

    4-6 medium tomatoes or 1½ cups cherry tomatoes
    3-4 apricots or about 1/2 cup chopped
    1/4 cup loosely-packed fresh basil
    2 garlic cloves, minced
    1 tablespoon olive oil
    2 teaspoons balsamic vinegar
    salt and pepper
    bread
    olive oil

    Chop the tomatoes and apricots. Thinly slice the basil (reserving a few whole leaves for garnish). Toss tomatoes and apricots with the rest of the ingredients, adding salt and pepper to taste.

    Toast the bread. Once golden-brown, drizzle with olive oil and slice into bite-size pieces. Top with bruschetta, garnish with reserved basil, and serve immediately.

  • RED Hearts: Entertainment: A High V for Maroon 5's New Album

    By Jessica Goodman, 24, reporting from Los Angeles, CA, on the latest master work by Adam Levine

    Everyone seems to have an opinion about Adam Levine. Whatever yours is, a lot has changed in his life and music since he formed a band in 1994 with high school friends. They grew up to be Maroon 5, and, more than ten years since their singles “This Love,” “Harder to Breathe” and “Songs About Jane” put them on top of the charts, they’ve just released their fifth studio album, V. That’s pronounced “five,” as in the Roman numeral. As I was saying, everyone seems to have an opinion about Adam Levine.

    My opinion? I’ve been a huge Maroon 5 fan for as long as I can remember. They were one the first bands I felt a connection to, that they just understood me. Whenever I felt down—or even amped up—I would put on one of their songs and everything just slowed down for a couple of minutes. I still have their last album Overexposed in my car, and I’m shocked that the CD has not cracked! It has a ton of great songs, including one with Wiz Khalifa called “Payphone” that always gets me singing along.

    The brand-new one, V, has 11 songs plus 3 bonus tracks. At the very least, “Maps,” “Animals” and “It Was Always About You” are sure-thing hits. The Voice coach even has a duet on the album with Gwen Stefani called “My Heart Is Open.” It’s about not wanting to be with someone else after a breakup, and it’s as ballad-y as anything the band has ever done: It won’t take me long to find another lover, but I want you/I can’t spend another minute getting over loving you. This is a situation I have personally dealt with and almost everyone can relate to.

    V manages to cover seemingly all the different phases of a relationship, from finding a new one or finding The One to sometimes finding yourself too scared to admit your feelings. It’s hard to find music these days that reaches every level like that and continues to draw in an audience that knows exactly where those emotions are coming from.

    I’d say Maroon 5 hit it out of the park with this one, sticking to the core of their voice but taking it just the right amount further, deeper. Levine recently tied the knot with Victoria’s Secret model Behati Prinsloo. It’s hard not to imagine each song here—at least those on the happy side of the heart—was written with her in mind! Lucky girl eh?

  • RED Hearts: Entertainment: Boyhood: A Movie Surprisingly About You

    By Carey Dunne, 24, reporting from Brooklyn, NY, on a life filmed over 12 years.

    After seeing Richard Linklater's latest movie, Boyhood, I kept wanting to talk about it, kept annoyingly asking people if they'd seen it—and feeling almost personally offended if they had and didn't love it.

    As you may have heard by now, in Boyhood, he filmed the same actors—among them, Patricia Arquette as a struggling single mother and Ethan Hawke as a deadbeat musician dad—for a few days each year over the course of 12 years. In 2002, Linklater cast Ellar Coltrane, then age six, as the protagonist, Mason. He cast his own daughter, Lorelei Linklater, as Mason’s older sister. To get to watch the growing up that happens between then and 2012 verges on miraculous.

    The characters morph before our eyes: In Mason’s case, he’s a dreamy kindergartener lying on his front lawn playing with geckos then a shaggy-haired kid intimidated by his drunken, violent stepfather in the suburbs of Dallas. Soon, as a crack-voiced adolescent in the cringey siege of puberty, he’s watching the outbreak of the Iraq War on TV. Then he’s angstily experimenting with blue nail polish, girlfriends and weed, and finally moving into his college dorm room.

    This epic coming-of-age story channels all the wonder of time-lapse photography, except as applied to changing human lives instead of a sprouting plant or windblown clouds. Perhaps most astonishing, the grand scale of it doesn’t come off as grandiose; the director doesn’t hit you over the head with its poignancy. Instead, he works in moments of real life and subtle humor.

    For those born in the late 80s and early 90s, watching the film creates an eerie sense of seeing your own life flash before your eyes (although nothing compared to what it must have been like for Coltrane himself to watch). Your childhood had its own variation of lining up with the other wannabe wizards for the Harry Potter release. You remember those early candy-colored iMacs. You remember the battle of the Bush vs. Kerry lawn signs.

    It all makes for an intense, highly personal sense of nostalgia. But it also creates a feeling of unity and connection with a generation—arguably other generations, too—that can be hard to come by. It’s not pride so much as a realization that collective memories of nationwide traumas and cultural events bind you, that your coming-of-age stories are often more similar than they might look on the surface. And they sure look amazing as they unfold on a movie screen.